Whither the GOP establishment?

Tuesday

Jan 31, 2012 at 12:01 AMJan 31, 2012 at 12:15 AM

LEWISTON, Maine — Against all odds, against all expectations, perhaps even against all reason, the Republican presidential nomination fight is centered in Florida this week and then moves to a hopelessly complex process here in Maine next week. This is a far different contest than the Republicans conducted a few weeks, a few miles and a political lifetime away across the border in New Hampshire.

Strip the cant from the 2012 Republican nomination fight and you have a front-runner who lost two out of the first three tests and now is barely entitled to the title; a challenger in the race to be standard-bearer of a family-values party who has had three wives, almost no allies and many blood enemies in his own party; and another contender who lost in his own state, considered essential to a GOP victory, by 18 points in his Senate re-election fight.

In the old days, a formula like that would be a summons for the political establishment to do something, or anything: step in to force implausible candidates from the race, step forward with a new contender in the list or step up the pressure to bring order to the proceedings. But none of that is happening or is likely to happen anytime soon.

Is it possible that in the party of the establishment there is no party establishment anymore — that in the caucus of the old guard, no one is on guard?

This is the Republican question that dares not speak its name; one that suggests that the character of a political party more than a century and a half old has shifted — startlingly, significantly — in the past decade or two.

Right now, the Republicans seem to be avoiding the question entirely, speaking obliquely of a party establishment but never identifying its members or even its inclinations.

Indeed, Newt Gingrich, who as a former House speaker would ordinarily be regarded as a charter member of the establishment, is plainly running against the establishment. “The establishment is right to be worried about a Gingrich nomination,” he said on “Meet the Press.” “We are going to make the establishment very uncomfortable.”

But here is the secret: There is no establishment to make uncomfortable, or to make things right in a party that seems to be hungry for someone, something or anything to make things right, or at least to make things clear.

“The old way of doing things in the Republican Party is gone,” says former GOP Sen. Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire. “The party is full of independent contractors, following their own instincts.”

Gingrich is plainly ineligible to play the part of the establishment; he has the credentials but not the temperament and, besides, is one of the contenders in the nomination fight. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts has classic establishment credentials — former governor of an important state, son of a respected business leader, revered Midwestern governor and Nixon Cabinet member, and possessor of degrees from Harvard Law and Harvard Business — but he’s in the fight, too.

Ordinarily, former presidents would be establishment figures, but one of them, George H.W. Bush, is frail and is to the new warriors of the GOP a symbol of easy compromise. The other, George W. Bush, is still politically radioactive. If there is a Republican establishment left, it consists of the times, rarer now than in years past, when Robert J. Dole, Howard H. Baker Jr., and Rudman, three retired senators who stay in touch but whose average age is 85, get together for dinner. None has been in office more recently than 16 years ago.

None of the other figures — not Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s aide; not Charles R. Black Jr., the veteran GOP adviser; neither of whom has held major office — qualifies as a party leader whose word might make mortals tremble or whose dictates might carry the voltage of a thunderbolt.

The Republicans have had such figures in past decades — former nominees Dwight D. Eisenhower, Thomas Dewey and Richard M. Nixon, or House Majority Leader Charles A. Halleck, Senate Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen or former House Speaker Joseph Martin — but they don’t have one now.

Today, neither Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell nor House Speaker John Boehner can play the role. Neither can speak for his entire caucus or for the entire party; both are worried about the influence of tea party irregulars in their respective houses. It may be that the modern Republican establishment has been relegated to the presidents of a few Rotary clubs in cities with populations under 100,000.

The Republicans aren’t alone. Four years ago, the insurgent Democratic candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, defeated the establishment candidate, Sen. Hillary Clinton, who had the support of a former president, big labor and many liberal interest groups. Usually, the president of the United States automatically is regarded as an establishment figure, but Obama shirks from the role and, as a recent account of life within the first family suggests, is uncomfortable with many of the rituals of political life, like sitting around after hours with people he detests and assuring them how important they are.

But a party that has specialized in toppling the powerful, as the Democrats did until recently, doesn’t need an establishment as much as one that, until recent decades, practiced a conservatism of the old definition, which was resistance to change. That is why, in the past, Republicans selected nominees such as Dewey, Nixon, Ronald Reagan, the elder Bush and Dole, all with conventional credentials and all with presidential campaigns (and in three cases a vice presidential campaign) behind them.

That Republican craving for safety and stability is firmly in the past, which is why the safest and probably least unpredictable among the GOP contenders, Romney, is so insistently seeking to minimize the very establishment credentials that in 1960 or 1968 would have assured him of the nomination, probably without breaking a sweat, which is the way establishment politicians operate.

“The Republicans have become much more of a grass-roots party than a grass-tops party,” says former Reagan White House Chief of Staff Kenneth M. Duberstein. “The ground has really shifted ever since the Republicans lost the presidency.”

That’s the whole point. In the old days, the Republicans, the grounded ones in our politics, won votes because they helped keep the ground from shifting.

David M. Shribman is executive editor of the PittsburghPost-Gazette. Send email to dshribman@post-gazette.com.

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